It’s hardball campaign politics, of course, less surprising
perhaps with the Obama-Carter comparison.

As he was fighting to get re-elected in 1980, Mr. Carter as
commander-in-chief had to deal with the Iran hostage
crisis – 52 Americans held for 444 days when militants took over
the US Embassy in Tehran. Carter
ordered a rescue mission that failed, killing eight US service
personnel.

“For the first time since Jimmy Carter, we’ve had an American
ambassador assassinated,” Romney foreign policy adviser Richard
Williamson told the
Washington Post. (The reference is to Adolph Dubs, US
ambassador to Afghanistan,
killed in a kidnapping attempt in 1979.)

Mr. Romney himself has invoked Carter, as did GOP
vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan
when he asserted that “every president since the
Great Depression who asked Americans to send them into a
second term could say that you are better off today than you were
four years ago, except for Jimmy Carter and for President Barack
Obama."

Mr. Carter, of course, lost the 1980 election, and the Romney
campaign’s aim is to see President Obama meet the same political
fate.

But in his controversial comments regarding the attack on the US
consulate in Benghazi,
Libya – that Obama was “sympathizing” with the attackers and
“apologizing for America’s values” – Romney himself is being
likened to a failed president, the one forced to resign in
disgrace.

“He has not shown that he is a person of original foreign policy
thinking,” she said in a Wall Street Journal video. Regarding what
many analysts found to be snap and intemperate comments in the
middle of a diplomatic crisis that would spread from Egypt and Libya
to other countries, she said, “I don’t feel that Mr. Romney has
been doing himself any favors.”

Then came the kicker.

“Romney looked weak today,” Ms. Noonan said. “At one point, he
had a certain slight grimace on his face when he was taking tough
questions from the reporters. And I thought, ‘He looks like
Richard Nixon.’”

As the week wore on, Noonan wasn’t the only one on the right
critical of Romney’s attempt to cast the tragedy in Libya – where
Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other embassy employees
were killed in what seems to have been a coordinated attack,
perhaps with ties to Al Qaeda – in
an overtly political light.

The Romney campaign “probably should have waited,” former
US
Senator John Sununu said on MSNBC.
“You look at the way things unfolded, you look at the timing of
it, they probably should have waited."

Mark
Salter, senior strategist for Sen. John
McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, wrote on RealClearPolitics:
“In the wake of this violence, the rush by Republicans –
including Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin
and scores of other conservative critics – to condemn [Obama] for
policies they claim helped precipitate the attacks is as tortured
in its reasoning as it is unseemly in its timing.”

“Politicians must pander, it goes with the job,” conservative
writer David Frum
wrote on the Daily
Beast. “But they mustn't leave their fingerprints all over
their pandering. The Romney campaign's attempt to score political
points on the killing of American diplomats was a dismal business
in every respect. Disregarding every other aspect, however, it
was graceless and stupid as a matter of politics.”

These days, Republicans love to be likened to (or at least bask
in the glow of) Ronald Reagan. So perhaps it’s worth noting what
Mr. Reagan as presidential challenger said during President
Carter’s dark hour when the Iran hostage rescue mission had
failed.

“This is a difficult day for all of us Americans,” Reagan said at
a press conference. “It is time for us … to stand united. It is a
day for quiet reflection … when words should be few and confined
essentially to our prayers.”